Hugh’s tips for no-waste eating
Eat the bits you normally throw away You can eat the carrot stalks – chop them up and add to salads like parsley. Try a salad of raw baby carrots with a little dressing, into which you stir some raw carrot stalk – the same way that you can eat the leaves of your beetroot.
Make soup Think to yourself – why are you throwing that away? Sling it into a vegetable soup. Radish leaves make a great soup – add to a soup of other greens, or to pea and lettuce soup. Don’t stick to the recipe – if you haven’t got kale you can try spinach. If you’ve got something in your fridge fling it in to the recipe and see how it goes, rather than letting it go to waste. Cook something for now and a ready meal for later I use the freezer a lot. If I’ve got too much of a veg, I’ll cook too much of whatever I’m cooking. I‘ve got at least eight half-litre pots of nettle soup in the fridge! And there’s no such thing as too many tomatoes – when I’ve got a massive glut, I fill whole roasting trays with tomatoes, a bit of garlic, oil, salt, pepper and a few herbs, sieve them to make passata and freeze it.
Try fermenting and pickling I do quite a bit of fermenting root veg like celeriac or cabbage, usually with a twist. I like classic sauerkraut, but tweaked with caraway seeds or grated celeriac, with a bit of orange zest and a bit of spice. Within 10 days, in salted water, you’ve got a nice ferment. It’s a great way of extending the life of root veg and wasting much less.